Scientific Writing Knowledge Hub

Writing stages & strategies

3 min read

The writing process can loosely be divided into five stages:

  1. Researching: Gathering information
  2. Pre-writing: Making sense of the information
  3. Structuring: Deciding what to write and where.
  4. Drafting: Writing the draft.
  5. Editing: Edit, and polish the draft.

Note that revising — either based on supervisor, co-authors, or reviewer feedback — is not included in this list. Revising is basically going through this list again: you may need to do more research (e.g. read some extra literature), need to do more pre-writing, re-structuring, etc.

Each stage requires different strategies. I’ll suggest some useful strategies below.

1 Researching (Intro, Methods, Results)

Researching includes a number of activities.

  • Identifying the broader problem (significance)
  • [Identifying the knowledge gap]
  • [Deciding on research questions]
  • Deciding how to carry out the study (methods rationale)
  • Collecting data (methods procedure)
  • Analysing and presenting data (methods/results)

Capturing your research decisions and methodology

In an ideal world, you’ve already noted down (see also: Note-taking) how you carried out these activities during the research. However, as a relative beginner it’s difficult to know which decisions will matter, so more often than not, you need re-construct your reasoning. Here’s how you can do that:

  • Prompted writing for the Introduction and methods rationale to capture/re-construct research decisions.
  • Chronological drafting for the methods procedures.

Tip

Note that these activites directly map onto the Introduction and Methods in a typical IMRaD paper:

  • Broader problem : Broader context
  • Identifying the knowledge gap : Current state of knowledge & gaps
  • Deciding on research questions : Study aims & scope
  • Deciding how to carry out the study : Methods rationale
  • Collecting & analysing data : Methods procedures

-> See also IMRaD sections

  • ==*To do: write missing pages on knowledge gap, research questions, note taking
  • ==elaborate on prompted writing and chronological drafting==

2 Pre-writing (Discussion)

Assuming that you know roughly what information you’re going to include in the Introduction (as we saw above that was part of the researching phase), the pre-writing is mostly necessary for the Discussion. This is where you’re going to make sense of you findings.

The pre-writing consists of multiple activities:

  • Inventorying: Which research questions + what results do I have
  • Sense-making: What do these findings mean? What can I conclude about the data?
  • Criticising: Do these conclusions make sense?

Here is a suggested workflow for on how to do that exactly: Pre-writing workflow

Tip: Finish the Intro first

It’s quite tough to make sense of your findings if you don’t know what your research questions are, or what knowledge gap you’re trying to address. So make sure you’ve captured that explicitly before you start with pre-writing — a pretty Introduction is not necessary, but at least make sure you’ve jotted down the details somewhere.

3 Outlining

Deciding what information to include, and in which order, so that it makes sense to you reader. See Hidden IMRaD structure

4 Drafting

Writing the actual text based on your outline. Not always necessary (i.e. if reverse outlining/restructuring the text prepared in the pre-writing phase already did the job).

5 Polishing